About a year ago, right after The Decision Tree book came out, I realized that a concept I touched on in the book had far larger potential. The Feedback Loop, it struck me, had potential as a framework for improving human behavior throughout our lives. Indeed, feedback loops could be put into action beyond health, into areas such as productivity, energy consumption, and other categories where human behavior plays a pivotal role.
So it only took me 15 months, then, to tap out the article that is now the cover story in the new issue of WIRED: The Feedback Loop: How To Get Better At Anything.
This is a classic tech/trend piece, but one that I’m especially proud of, because I think it represents some thinking that goes way beyond my meager brain. It is, as much as anything I’ve ever written, very much in the zeitgeist in Silicon Valley. The idea is simple: Tracking our behavior can help us improve it. (This is the essence of the Quantified Self meetups that my pals Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly have curated). But the opportunity today is profound: New sensors can help us track our behavior more readily than ever before – and, moreover, that tracking can extend beyond the Silicon Valley crowd to the population at large. Feedback loops can be incorporated into all sorts of experiences and tools, and can be readily understood by all sorts of people. Thus, all of a sudden, a rather geeky idea starts to get rather universal. And that means SCALE, and that’s where it starts to get interesting.
One thing I was sorry about in the Wired story was that I couldn’t give full voice to the vast historical and contemporary context of feedback loops, exploring their roots in 18th century engineering and 20th century military strategy and contemporary philosophy and behavioral science. There is a HUGE amount to talk about in terms of feedback loops – where they come from, what they draw on, what they help us with today, and what they might enable tomorrow.
In other words, there’s a lot more to say here. It’s almost like there’s another book in it….
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Sign in nowThis brands me as a colossal dork, but those Apple patents are for the design of the Apple ///, not the Mac. The Apple /// (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III) was a very advanced 8-bit machine, sucessor to the Apple II, and Apple’s first big failure. It was also totally unrelated to the Mac, and didn’t even support a mouse. So there.
“a device similar to today’s track ball, which was inserted alongside radar screens and was used for retrieval of aircraft data. From 1966 to the American company Orbit produced such “Ball Tracker, ” (google translate of the Heise article)
The track ball goes back *much* further than this. It was invented in 1952 by a Canadian company as part of the user interface for a radar / packet data system. The English Wikipedia entry is an accurate summary of this, although the German language one doesn’t mention it at all.
[...] Importance: Fact-checking medical claims – via Decision Tree- In 2007/08, the work of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler revealed that human behaviors, and even states of mind, tracked through social networks much like infectious disease. But according to a new research study, incorrect medical facts may be no different, galloping from person to person, even within the confines of the revered peer-reviewed scientific literature. And by looking at how studies cite facts about the incubation periods of certain viruses, a new study in PLoS ONE has found that quite often, data assumed to be medical fact isn’t based on evidence at all. [...]
[...] may be ignored since they haven’t had enough time to generate a significant h-index score. But as I’ve discussed before, there is a clear trend of people working to bring public health data to light faster than before. [...]
To paraphrase the Blues Brothers, “If raw milk cheese kills me, I don’t mind dyin’…”
Haggie: Ha – maybe you have a point! I hope you’ll tune it to find out what I uncover.
[...] Read post 1 here: So long, raw milk cheese [...]
Perhaps they should irradiate the cheese or use another sterilization method that does not change the taste. Irradiation is so underused!
In my book, people should be free to buy whatever they want so long as their is a disclaimer and it is well above the market price.
Irradiation isn’t the answer. Raw dairy products is more complex issue than taste. For some people it is taste, for others it’s about health. When you irradiate something it doesn’t differentiate between harmful and helpful bacteria. It might sound gross in this day in age of over-sanitizing everything we can, but there are healthy helpful bacteria that are useful to our bodies and if we irradiate our food we’re altering it nutritionally. Same goes for pasteurization. Some people argue that cooking does too (though I think there are things that are meant to be cooked … though not overcooked or burnt.)
Basically I want to be able to continue to choose to eat what I want how I want it. I would NOT buy raw milk from a farmer I didn’t trust. Raw milk cheese on the other hand is a little less likely to be a problem than plain raw milk. No chemical additives, no flash heat treatments, no irradiation, no genetically altered seeds.
I want to retain that choice of what food I put in my body without having to buy a farm out in Timbuktu to grow it all myself. Where does it end?
And the reason I’m a raw milk advocate is that it has helped me with my allergies when traditional drugs and shots did nothing. I’m not saying it was a cure all, just saying it’s one of several things I started doing and when I remove it my allergies do start coming back.
I was excited to see the Wired piece too, although I was would have liked some mention of feedback as part of larger more complete social systems. It seemed to focus on how on individual can minimize risk; i.e. negative feedback. What about positive feed back (hypcercycles or catalytic cycles)? Scientists have talked about feedback loops’ role in evolution, and I think that feedback loops are incredibly important for major social change. I wrote a blog on it:
http://thefeedbackloop.org/2011/06/22/feedback-loops-stir-shit-up/
Lovely reflection on climate and infectious disease. I will share this with the JIDC FB users.
I find this to be a fascinating relationship.
As I was doing some research a couple of weeks ago I became aware of this paper
published in the JIDC. Not trying to plug the journal, but I highly recommend this article reviewing Cholera in the marine environment. Entitled: Influence of environmental factors
on the presence of Vibrio cholerae in the marine environment: a climate link
http://www.jidc.org/index.php/journal/article/view/19734600/207
Before reading this paper I had not thought about this environmental relationship deeply. Of course Cholera would be connected to the marine environment (mainly I had thought of sewage), but I had not thought about the connection with weather patterns.
Thanks,
Alyson
Thanks, Alyson. I thought people might like this PNAS study. For all the talk on climate change, I’m surprised that there isn’t more effort directed to understanding how this could impact public health and infectious disease. Thanks for sharing the links.
Does not storms play an important role in the dissemination of Infectious diseases agents from one continent to other or to the neighboring countries?
Hi there. Thanks again. Everyone really liked your write-up. It was shared many times by JIDC members.
[...] a podcast of the introduction to Goetz’s book The Decision Tree: Navigating the Future of [...]
[...] a podcast of the introduction to Goetz’s book The Decision Tree: Navigating the Future of [...]
Well that’s an interesting story. I can only imagine the possibilities of these “miracle berries” and what kinds of recipes would be created.